Betterment

Once you use your plates every day, they cease to be the good china. Of course, the plates didn’t change. Your story did. The way you treat them did. The same goes for the red carpet. If you …

They’re essential. The house begins to stink if we don’t take out the garbage. But at work, while they might be essential, they may not be important. At least, not important enough for …

Becoming a solo entrepreneur in the years after leaving an employer can give your Social Security benefit and savings a boost. Here’s what to know.

Thomas Aquinas famously counseled us to “beware the man of one book.” He meant it in the context of debate: if someone has spent their whole life studying

Learning Markdown’s tricks is perhaps the easiest way to become a better developer.

Walk into a bank with a stocking on your head and you’re probably going to get arrested. Civil society as we know it is dependent on identity and responsibility. A person does something and o…

Roger Bannister ran a four-minute mile by having a relay race of pace runners next to him. If he could keep up with his pacer, he’d finish the run in record time. If you work in an office whe…

Part of the luxury of living near the ocean or the mountains is that you can be picky. If the surf or the powder isn’t great, leave it for the tourists. Good is insufficient, wait for the gre…

Imagine you’re a young, creative person with lots of potential. One day you aspire to be a professional “creative” (whatever that means). Artist,

“What is my manager’s deal, anyway?” Here’s some career advice that can help you build a more effective relationship with your manager. Remember, they may be a manager but they don’t know everythin…

Are you struggling to find an effective, inexpensive workout that's not in a gym? GoRuck's small sandbag will solve all your problems.

A cat’s eye is smooth but doesn’t seem to be… there’s a mystery of depth. That illusion is called chatoyancy. The same is true for some sorts of woods (cedar is an exception…

Bust writer's block and be more creative with our magical writing AI.

Amazon is the last one. They are probably the last huge company where hundreds of thousands of people will be surveilled, measured and ordered to follow the rule book. The pandemic didn’t cre…

A Zettelkasten is a personal tool for thinking and writing that creates an interconnected web of thought. Its emphasis is on connection and not mere collection of ideas.

Kind of a Goodhart’s law with more explanation, Campbell’s law, rather pessimistically suggests: The more any quantitative social indicator is used for social decision-making, the more subject it will be to corruption pressures and the more apt it will be to distort and corrupt the social processes it is intended to monitor. It pretty much seems to work with everything, unfortunately. If you measure the performance of an employment office by the number of cases handled you may get quick but ineffective placements and interviews. If, instead, you measure them on number of persons placed in jobs you may unintentionally drive a focus on placing the simplest cases at the expense of those who most need the service. When customer support is measured by number of tickets dealt with I’ve heard of writing quick answers that don’t fully solve a question in the knowledge that the customer will soon come back with another ticket to solve. When policing effectiveness is judged by crimes reported and the number of unsolved cases you may get both under reporting of crimes, and a form of plea bargaining where a criminal may be encouraged to confess to extra crimes — therefore fewer unsolved cases — in exchange for more lenient sentences. Campbell notes that: It seems to be well documented that a well-publicized, deliberate effort at social change–-Nixon’s crackdown on crime–-had as its main effect the corruption of crime-rate indicators, achieved through underrecording and by downgrading the crimes to less serious classifications. Measuring schools on attendance encourages creative reasons for children being taken out of school. Assessing learning can quickly become teaching to, and cramming for, the test. When reviews come to dominate purchase decisions pressure increases for fake reviews. And then there’s elections and voting… Campbell, Donald, Assessing the Impact of Planned Social Change, Dec 1976. (pdf) HT: Benjamin Baker who shared it with me when I posted about Goodhart. Also, for alternative sides to what gets measaured gets better there’s Seth Godin’s take on Campbell’s law: Speedometer confusion, and Scott Carter’s pithier paraphrasing of Campbell’s law: “What gets measured, gets corrupted.”

A quick, simple and interactive team exercise

Psychological safety is a critical component of high-performing teams. In this blog, learn how to measure the psychological safety in your organization.

Salt is essentially free. A bag of salted nuts is the same price (or less) as an unsalted one. But salt used to be expensive. Truly expensive, like gold. We keep seeing the deflation of things we w…

We don’t design a book until after it’s written. Or cast the movie until the screenplay is complete. The house painter has an important job, but it makes no sense to plan for the painti…

A while back, one of our favorite entrepreneurs, Ben Chestnut, was interviewed on the How I Built This Podcast with Guy Raz. Ben is the co-founder and

The other day I sat down to write. But it didn’t happen. It just wasn’t there. The words. The momentum. One thought leading into the next. I knew I wanted to say something. I knew what I wanted it to be about. But I couldn’t get much further than that, beyond just a few sentences. A classic case of writer’s block, right? Maybe. Except I happen to think that writer’s block doesn’t exist. I’m with Jerry Seinfeld who said, “Writer’s block is a phony, made-up, BS excuse for not doing your work.” The words I chose above were illustrative: It just wasn’t there. What is it? It wasn’t the muses. Or inspiration. And I’ve never been a genius so that hadn’t abandoned me. What wasn’t there then? The work. I hadn’t done the work. Writing is a byproduct of hours and hours of reading, researching, thinking, making my notecards. When a day’s writing goes well, it’s got little to do with that day at all. It’s actually a lagging indicator of hours and hours spent researching and thinking. Every passage and page has a prologue titled preparation. The solution to my writer’s block that day was not to write at all. It was to stop for the day and go research the topic more. It was to go for a run and a walk. It was to do the prep work. Success as a lagging indicator is a phenomenon that holds true across most areas in life. When I look in the mirror and I’m a little flabby, that is a lagging indicator that, for weeks and months, I’ve slacked on eating healthy and exercising. When I’m grouchy and frustrated and anxious or short with my wife, that is usually a lagging indicator that I need to eat (in 2014,  Researchers from Ohio State University found  that most fights between couples are because someone is hungry). When I’m getting sick a lot, that is a lagging indicator that I have not been taking care of myself, working too hard,  not sleeping enough . Your retirement accounts are a lagging indicator of whether or not you have your financial act together—earning enough, saving enough. Pulling an all-nighter is not a sign of dedication but a lagging indicator of the exact opposite. It means you plan poorly, you procrastinate, you aren’t proactive enough, you don’t know how to effectively manage your work and your time. Not being able to  fully disconnect from your devices  on vacation is a lagging indicator that you don’t have good systems in place. Hitting a personal record on the bench press is a lagging indicator of a lot of discipline and hard work. Receiving a promotion is a lagging indicator of a lot of quality work. Delivering a keynote with confidence is a lagging indicator  of a lot of preparation . All my books are lagging indicators.  They are a culmination of years of work . That’s actually Robert Greene’s definition of creativity. He says, “creativity is a function of the previous work you put in.” Creativity is not mysterious or romantic. It’s tedious, Robert says. “If you put a lot of hours into thinking and researching and reading, hour after hour—a very tedious process—creativity will come to you.” But so are their sales.  The Obstacle is the Way  sold in its first year what  Discipline is Destiny  sold in a week. How? Because day after day after day, I worked to build a system, a platform, that has become a flywheel that day after day spins faster and faster. Combined, over a million readers have subscribed to  Daily Stoic ,  Daily Dad ,  The Reading List Email , and this RSS email lists. Of course, I have social media, too (you can follow me on  Instagram ,  Twitter ,  TikTok  and  YouTube ). In other words, I’ve filled a dozen football stadiums worth of “true fans” who I have built a relationship with. This is what keeps me moving—knowing that I have to keep filling and refilling the creative well. Knowing that creative output is a lagging indicator of a lot of hours of tedious work. Knowing that if I want to publish more books in the future, the only question is, am I doing the work now? It’s what keeps my priorities straight as a parent. I want to have a relationship with my kids as long as I am able to—which means investing in it now. In twenty years, attendance at Thanksgiving will be voluntary.  Attendance will be a lagging indicator of who I was as a parent today . It’s true as a spouse too. Fifty years of marriage is a lagging indicator of how quickly arguments are resolved today, how mistakes are handled today, the pressure of (or better yet, the lack thereof) today. And it’s true of fame and celebrity—at least the good kind, not the famous-from-a-sex tape kind. Bruce Dickinson from Iron Maiden  would say in an interview  that “fame is the excrement of creativity, it’s the shit that comes out the back end, it’s a by-product of it.” It’s a lagging indicator of years of making stuff that people like and get to know you through. Even this article is an example. It’s a lagging indicator, a byproduct of a process that started with an idea on a notecard, to an idea I kicked around with others in conversations and with myself on walks, which led to a first draft I spent time on across several days, which I returned to across several weeks whenever I had tweaks and improvements, which was edited by a team, and then finally published. Nothing comes from nowhere. Not success. Not inspiration. Not the muses. Not writer’s block. Everything is a lagging indicator. Of whether or not you did the work. Tweet Facebook Twitter Google+ Pinterest LinkedIn

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You have ripened already, and you are waiting to be brought in. Your exhaustion is a form of inner fermentation. You are beginning, ever so slowly to rot on the vine. The dark bottle stood there in preparation for a guest I would be seeing that night. I dropped into a chair and looked at